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Six years before his successful bid to become leader of Welsh Labour, I attended a small, behind-the-scenes seminar at which I gained an insight into Carwyn Jones’ political thinking, and particularly into his attitude towards devolution.

The event was organised by the Institute of Welsh Affairs at Gregynog Hall, the University of Wales’ residential centre near Newtown. Its purpose was to comment on a draft paper written by Mr Jones called The Future of Welsh Labour.

In it, he made a powerful case in favour of primary lawmaking powers being granted to the National Assembly at a time when there remained much resistance within Welsh Labour to such a position.

He also made the case for the Welsh Government to get powers over income tax, although at the time he thought that could only happen after a referendum.

Months later Mr Jones’ paper was published and he became the standard bearer within the Welsh Government for soft nationalism of the kind that became his stock-in-trade during his time as First Minister.

Some have speculated that his apparent commitment to enhanced devolution was merely an electoral ploy aimed at attracting Plaid Cymru voters, especially in Labour/ Tory marginals. Based on his Gregynog paper and the discussion that preceded its publication, I believe he genuinely wanted to move devolution forward.

When he stood for the party leadership in December 2009, there was an enormous amount of goodwill towards him from the membership, which was reflected in his ability to defeat his rivals Edwina Hart and Huw Lewis on the first ballot.

He was the most polished of the three candidates, looking and sounding like a First Minister. Despite his young age for a senior politician – he was 42 when elected to the role – his avuncular manner enabled him to appear reassuring and authoritative in TV and radio interviews.

The nationalist-light rhetoric that annoyed Plaid Cymru so much played well for Carwyn Jones when the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats took power in Westminster following the General Election which took place in May 2010, just five months after he became First Minister.

For those who were listening – and in a Welsh political context we can’t ignore the unfortunate fact that many weren’t – Mr Jones became a master of deflecting blame for any of the Welsh Government’s shortcomings onto the UK Government.

He shamelessly borrowed Plaid Cymru’s “Standing up for Wales” narrative to portray himself as leader of an administration that was battling on behalf of the Welsh people against an England-obsessed UK Government that cared nothing for those living on the wrong side of the Severn.

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Such a narrative served Welsh Labour well in 2011, helping it win 30 of the 60 seats and allowing it to dispense with Plaid, which had been its junior coalition partner for four years (Plaid, in any case, was inclined to go off and lick its wounds, having benefited from no electoral dividend despite its time in government).

The 2011 Assembly election came just two months after the referendum which saw a decisive victory for the cross-party campaign led by Carwyn Jones that argued for the Assembly to get primary lawmaking powers in place of the convoluted cap-in-hand arrangement that was in place before, under which permission had to be sought from Westminster to legislate in specific policy areas.

This, perhaps, was the high point of his First Ministership – winning a referendum and taking the Assembly forward to a necessary constitutional position, and following that up with a successful election campaign that enabled his party to govern alone.

And yet securing both victories was possible largely because of the auspicious circumstances that existed from Jones’ point of view. There was a Tory-led government in Westminster that Wales needed to be protected from – and a Labour Welsh Government with primary lawmaking powers was the best way to achieve such an outcome.

This argument proved convincing at the time, but it wouldn’t have worked if Labour had still been running the UK Government. While Plaid Cymru would happily have asserted it was “Standing up for Wales” against a Labour government in Westminster, Carwyn Jones could not have done that.

To do so would have required courageous leadership of a kind that demonstrated a distinctive policy vision, and there is precious little evidence to substantiate such a claim.

The ideological basis of the Welsh Government – progressive universalism – was inherited from Rhodri Morgan and moulded by Mark Drakeford, the social policy professor who was Mr Morgan’s chief adviser and who today will succeed Mr Jones as First Minister.

An important example of the policy in action is free prescriptions for all – providing valuable cash savings for poorer members of the community and a buy-in to the benefit from those who are more affluent. Mr Jones maintained the ideological commitment, but can’t claim credit for it.

He received much praise for keeping student tuition fees at little more than £3,000 a year at a time when fees for students in England jumped to £9,000. Parents wrote to him in gratitude, and he said such praise helped make doing his job worthwhile.

But the lower fees quickly became seen as unaffordable and were not maintained. Welsh students now have to pay as much as their English counterparts, although maintenance grants are more generous in line with the Liberal Democrat policy pursued by Kirsty Williams, the non-Labour Cabinet Secretary who restored Mr Jones’ effective majority after Rhondda was lost to Plaid Cymru at the 2016 Assembly election.

It would be unfair not to recognise Mr Jones’ ability to reach out beyond his party when it was in his interest to do so. Getting the backing of Ms Williams and of Dafydd Elis-Thomas after he left Plaid was important from the point of view of maintaining his government’s stability, but not every leader succeeds in such circumstances: Alun Michael didn’t manage it during the Assembly’s first year, for example, and rapidly paid the price.

Wales, of course, has serious problems that can’t be solved in the space of one or two Assembly terms: communities that are among the poorest in western Europe, too many people with chronic sickness and too many with poor educational qualifications or none. There are plenty of initiatives, but the degree to which tangible improvements have been delivered is questionable.

The temptation is to limit our expectations of political leaders and to judge them not so much on their lack of measurable achievements, but on the effectiveness of the tone they adopted and their success in electoral terms. The danger of such an approach is that it downgrades the possibility of any social advance and risks allowing populists who offer easy solutions the opportunity to dictate the agenda.

Carwyn Jones was able to put forward a good case for a constitutional convention to look at how to reconfigure the UK. He was able to articulate proposals for a realistic soft Brexit that could have protected the Welsh economy. The trouble is that no-one of any significance was listening, or was prepared to take his contributions seriously. So while he sometimes wowed those in the relatively small coterie of Welsh civil society, there was little cut-through to the general public or to those who make the big decisions.

His political impotence was best illustrated at the EU referendum in 2016. Despite campaigning vigorously for a Remain vote, and pointing out repeatedly the importance of Wales’ retaining “unfettered access” to the Single Market – a phrase that rivalled Theresa May’s “strong and stable leadership” in the speed with which it became a cliché – he ended up on the losing side.

Complex as the reasons were for Wales rejecting the EU, which had poured billions into its economy, the unfortunate reality from Mr Jones’ perspective is that his advice was rejected by the nation he sought to represent.

A lot had happened in the five years since the devolution referendum of 2011, when he had been on the winning side. Populism was on the rise, the impact of years of austerity was taking its toll, and voter loyalty meant very little any more. Carwyn Jones was by no means alone in being exposed to the harsh reality of such change, but he didn’t have the cachet to rise above it. He remained in power not because of his intrinsic leadership qualities, but because of the fragmentation of the opposition.

Had it not been for the Carl Sargeant tragedy, Mr Jones could have left office with a reputation for relative success. His avuncular manner would have matured with age, and he would have departed with goodwill all around.

But the death of Mr Sargeant has changed everything over the last year and a bit. The inquest has not been completed, the main QC-led inquiry has yet to get underway, and too many troubling questions remain unanswered.

It’s unprecedented for a political leader in Britain to be the focus of an inquiry into their treatment of a colleague before their death. The subject in itself is destined to have an impact on the leader’s legacy, regardless of the specific circumstances. In the present case, important evidence has still to emerge that is likely to have a defining bearing on how Carwyn Jones is viewed by history.

Surely no-one – least of all Mr Jones himself as he steps down after nine years as the most important political office-holder in Wales – would have wanted it this way.